


you're never alone (you still have us)

by kadaransmuggler



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: M/M, mom!vivienne, the death of clan lavellan, young inquisitor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-22
Updated: 2016-08-22
Packaged: 2018-08-10 10:53:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7841929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kadaransmuggler/pseuds/kadaransmuggler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aladar Lavellan recieves a letter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you're never alone (you still have us)

**Author's Note:**

> Keep in mind that the sad small elf is only eighteeen so he's still pretty much a child. For purposes of age difference, etc., Dorian is twenty-five. It's a hefty age difference, but not too bad.

When he got the letter, he was alone in his room. _By the time my forces arrived, the Dalish had been scattered or killed, and there seems to be little left of their clan._ Time seemed to stop. Everything seemed to stop, as if the whole world was waiting.

 

Time speeds up again all at once as the words slam into him with enough force to knock the breath from his body. He collapses in on himself, one hand gripping the letter and the other hanging desperately onto the edge of his desk as he falls to his knees. A shuddering breath scrapes in through his lungs, and then a sob tears it’s way out. Something inside him shatters, the shards piercing his heart and his lungs until he doesn’t know how he will ever survive. 

 

He only gets up to lock the door, grab a bottle of whiskey, and move onto the balcony, where the cold wind dries his tears on his cheeks. 

 

Hours later, when he has drank himself into a stupor out on the balcony, pressed against the railing, cold and crying and sick and _lost,_ Vivienne comes knocking on the door, having expected him hours ago.

 

“Darling? All you all right?” she calls. He does not answer, only stifles a sob that makes his ribs ache with the force of it. 

 

“Aladar, dear, why is your door locked? Is something wrong?” Vivienne calls out, ever watchful, ever concerned, and something in him breaks all over again and he sobs in earnest, great heaving things that threaten to tear him apart. 

 

“Aladar, you open this door right now!” Vivienne calls, her voice far-away and distant, and he is too far gone in his grief to move, his limbs stiff and numb from the cold. She pounds on the door for a few more moments, before all is silent. 

 

It is another hour before anything else happens, and he wonders how he has any tears left at all to cry, how his body can still shake with the sobs. He wonders how he still _is_. The mountain air has made the tears achingly cold as they slip down his face, and he huddles even further in on himself, alone with his grief, the last of Clan Lavellan. He wonders if there were any survivors at all. He wonders if Ellana, the pretty hunter who always took the time to listen to him managed to survive, or if Arvalassan, the first boy who'd ever kissed him, had managed to survive. He wonders if there are still members of his clan alive, members who have spread to the winds and perhaps found a new clan He lets out an exhausted whimper at the thought, and then the door swings open because Vivienne had gotten someone- maybe Varric, maybe Cole, maybe even Sera, to pick the lock. 

 

Vivienne is at his side in an instant, pulling him against her, cradling him, rocking him, making soft soothing sounds low in her throat. The paper is still crumbled in his fist after all this time, wet with tears and whiskey. She curls his fingers slowly, gently, and the reads over the note, and her heart breaks for the chid curled up against her, still shaking and trembling in his grief. 

 

“It’ll be okay,” she murmurs, helplessly, because in the end there is nothing else for her to do.

 

* * *

 

It is four days before he leaves his room, looking like he had been dragged through the Void and back. His movements are mechanical and the bags under his eyes are dark and deep, but he is moving and doing and he is _enduring_. That is, he thinks, a victory in and of itself. 

 

* * *

 

Two weeks later, Vivienne finds him in the garden, covered in dirt and mud and surrounded by plants. “Found a new hobby, darling?” she asks him. He looks up at her and wipes his face on his sleeve, leaving a new streak of mud. 

 

“I guess,” he mumbles. She looks at him inquisitively. 

 

“You guess?” she asks, her eyebrows arched.

 

“We Dalish have a tradition. When one of us die, when plant a tree over their body. There wasn’t enough room for trees, though, and no bodies for a burial,” he says, and something in Vivienne’s heart shatters as she reaches out to him, pulling the mud-covered boy close to her. 

 

“I’m so sorry,” she whispers, and he shudders in her arms as he tries to hold back a sob that breaks through anyway. 

 

* * *

 

She starts working out in the garden with him. He had a black thumb if she’d ever seen one, and she knew how important this was for him, so she did what she could to ensure the plants didn’t die. Not much grew in the cold ground at Skyhold, anyway. Not much aside from elfroot and blood lotus. The spindleweed seemed to be doing well, though. They said it grew well for the sorrowful, after all. 

 

* * *

 

Over the following weeks, Aladar slowly returns to something that’s almost resembles the person he was before the death of his clan. Vivienne hates to admit it, but even she can see that the Tevinter has a hand in helping him, pressing soft kisses to the corner of the boy's mouth until his lips tug upwards into a reluctant smile. She still worries about Aladar and about his relationship with Dorian, but it makes him happy, so she doesn’t say anything, merely keeps an eye on the two of them.

 

* * *

 

Days turn into weeks and weeks turn into months. It has been perhaps three months since Aladar learned of his clan’s fate when it happens. It is late, and well past midnight, when Vivienne is woken by the door to her bedroom opening slowly. It is Aladar, standing there in the moonlight that falls through the window, looking small and scared and lonely with a blanket draped around his shoulders. The door shuts behind him when he steps into the room, and she sees that he is crying. 

 

“I had a nightmare. About my clan,” he says, his voice barely above a whisper, and Vivienne scoots to the other side of her bed. 

 

“Come here, darling,” she says, and he slides under the covers and curls against her chest, shaking against her. It is a long while yet before he relaxes enough to sleep. She stays awake until the early hours of the morning, watching over him, until finally exhaustion pulls her eyes shut.

 

* * *

 

On the anniversary of the day he got the news, Vivienne expected him to shut down, like he had when he got the news. Instead, he spends the entire day in the kitchen, cooking a traditional Dalish feast. At the end of the day, he gathered the inner circle together in the garden. 

 

“What is this?” Cassandra asked. 

 

“You all are the closest thing I have to a clan, now,” he answers, and Cassandra sees the little boy who turned into a man too soon, and she wishes he could cling to his childhood longer. She shares a glance with Vivienne, a subtle nod with Dorian, and there is an unspoken pact between the three of them. Dorian pulls Aladar against his side, and Aladar's answering smile is brilliant and happy, perhaps the happiest he has been in a long while. Then Varric tells a joke and Aladar is laughing, and Cassandra thinks that, yes, they have become a family of sorts.


End file.
